Technology is going mobile and I'm here to cover the shift. En route to the Forbes gadget beat, I worked at Business Week, Time Asia and Random House. I also lived in South Korea and Hong Kong, where I quickly acquired a taste for fast broadband and sleek phones. Now I'm a staff writer focusing on telecom and mobile devices but with an interest in policy, e-commerce, location-based services and manufacturing/supply chain issues, among other topics.
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CES: ViewSonic Launching Android Smartphone, Its First For U.S. Market

Add ViewSonic to the list of Asian consumer electronics manufacturers trying to muscle in on the U.S. smartphone market. The Taipei-based company tells Forbes it will be showing a new Google Android-based handset at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The phone, dubbed ViewPhone 3, is aimed at Latin American consumers, but will also be available in the U.S., making it ViewSonic’s first U.S. handset release.

The ViewPhone 3 is LCD-maker ViewSonic's first smartphone for the U.S. market.

Releasing a smartphone may seem an unusual move for ViewSonic which is best known for its LCD monitors and displays. But Mike Holstein, a ViewSonic product manager who is based in the company’s Southern California office, sees the phone as a natural extension of ViewSonic’s tablet business. ViewSonic began releasing its ViewPad tablets in 2010. It currently sells six models, in either 7 or 10-inch sizes, and will unveil several more at CES.

Holstein declined to share ViewSonic’s tablet sales figures but said the business is going well enough that the company decided to expand its phone efforts. (ViewSonic has sold phones before, though only in limited areas, such as China and Taiwan.) The company recently acquired a group of employees from Taiwanese tech manufacturing giant Foxconn to bolster its phone design and business development capabilities. “We’re growing our phone portfolio and adding resources,” said Holstein in an interview.

The ViewPhone 3 is not going to wow consumers looking for standout specs. It has a decent set of features, including a 3.5-inch touchscreen, 5 megapixel camera, 800 MHz Qualcomm processor and 512 GB of RAM. The ViewPhone 3′s flavor of Android is Gingerbread (2.3), however, which has been available for over a year, and it runs on 3G technology instead of the faster 4G.

ViewSonic doesn’t intend the phone to be bleeding-edge or even high-end. Like the majority of its products, ViewSonic is aiming at the “value seeker” consumer with the ViewPhone 3, which will have an unsubsidized price of $250. The device’s most unusual feature – support for two SIM cards – is a capability popular in emerging markets. “It’s a low to mid-range phone,” noted Holstein. That segment, he adds, is where the majority of growth in the global smartphone market is expected to materialize.

When the ViewPhone 3 is ready to ship, in March, ViewSonic intends to market the phone in Latin America. It will start with Mexico, Chile and Colombia and gradually roll out availability to other Latin American countries. The company took a similar approach with its tablets, explained Holstein, and found it effective. The Latin American smartphone market, he said, is poised to grow 44% by 2015, outpacing other geographic regions.

At the same time, ViewSonic plans to release the ViewPhone 3 on its website for American consumers. The phone will be sold “unlocked” for use on AT&T and T-Mobile USA’s networks. ViewSonic would like to sign deals with U.S. carriers but has had a hard time so far. A partnership with Leap Wireless to carry one of its 7-inch Android tablets fizzled last year.

ViewSonic is hoping commercial and enterprise customers will buy the ViewPhone 3, which would lessen the need to win over finicky consumers. School districts, hospitals and government agencies have adopted ViewSonic’s tablets and are already big customers of its monitors, projectors and digital signs. Holstein said several U.S. companies including cruise line operators have expressed interest in a ViewSonic phone.

In a sign of optimism, ViewSonic has already planned follow-ons to the ViewPhone 3 and plans to announce them as soon as the middle of the year. Some of these future phones will be higher-end than the ViewPhone 3, said Holstein, and will feature the latest Android version, Ice Cream Sandwich.

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At $250 without contract it looks like just the gPod I’ve been looking for. Doubt I’d buy it as a phone though.

ViewSonic is an interesting brand. They have a sense of timing that’s… puzzling. They were early to market with a 10 inch Tegra 2 Android tablet (the gTablet) which lacked capacitive touchscreen, and had a sub-par user interface. I bought one steeply discounted and it’s a mix of old tech and new – but it browses the Internet and plays NetFlix just fine once I updated the firmware to something credible. It does plenty of apps. It’s generally seen as a failure, though a good value at the current price.

Thanks, great points. ViewSonic understands value. And these are Google-certified devices, so they are fully compatible with other Android services. They might be good for people willing to tinker around and tweak parts of the UI. Perhaps one reason ViewSonic was early to market with the gTablet is that the company first made tablets in 2001. Like other early tablets, those devices were Windows-based and came with a stylus. Even though those tablets didn’t really take off, the company continued to make similar devices for niche verticals, like retailers and healthcare customers, until about 2006. So, its launch of touchscreen tablets in 2010 was a return of sorts.